People visiting the Jinsha Site Museum in Chengdu, Sichuan province, are in for a pleasant surprise with the nuo culture exhibition being held on the first floor of the museum until March 31.

Sponsored by the Jinsha Site Museum, the Guizhou National Culture Palace in Guizhou province and the Museum of Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing, the exhibition features more than 400 cultural relics pertaining to nuo culture. These include masks, swords, ox horns and costumes used in Nuo Opera.

Nuo was originally a type of sacrificial and magical ritual in ancient China held to expel evil spirits and pestilence. The name nuo, which means a person in difficulty in the Chinese pictograph, is derived from one of these rituals in which people shouted nuo, nuo to drive away the devil.